Still under attack by Der Trumpf and Boris of the demolition team ... May on her way out.

The wacky Ambassador that the U.K. foisted upon the United States is not someone we are thrilled with, a very stupid guy. He should speak to his country, and Prime Minister May, about their failed Brexit negotiation, and not be upset with my criticism of how badly it was...

So, we're still in silly season where mad things are being suggested which might throw spanners in th works. And, of course, if we're being totally silly, the LibDems have a new leader as well promising the she will oppose brexit with every fibre of her being. Which, given their recent record of supporting the Tories, is quite seet really.

Even madder, the scuttlebutt is talking of anything between 2 and 11 Tories resigning to join the LibDems rather than support a Boris-led Tory Government, leading to a vote of no-confidence and a General Election in September/October. The evidence for this seems to be 2 or 3 people who were never going to be asked refusing to be Ministers in a Boris Cabinet.

Pardon me if I think people are getting a little over-excited. Tories are ammoral scum who would happily eat their granny on live TV if it meant they got to keep their seat and directorships for another electoral cycle.

Whatever disasters await the country, the Tories will happily sign up for it, they aren't the rebellious kind. Still, it allows journos to fill column inches in breathless manner.

My advice : Believe nothing till it happens. And even then look closely

Sadly no. There seems to be a mood that any newly appointed members of the Cabinet will say around Westminster and take command of their brief. This means that civil servants leave will be cancelled, which will impact family holidays and is going to go down like a cup of cold sick with the people the Tories need to be onside to get their shit done.

Of course, I imagine Boris will go on holiday, cos he's a lazy waste of space

🏁 The day's course has been called due to adverse weather conditions, rider times have been taken at Col de l'Iseran.🏁 La course est arrêtée à cause des conditions climatiques. Les temps sont pris en haut du Col de l'Iseran.#TDF2019

The European Union's top court says website owners could face legal risk over Facebook's ubiquitous "Like" buttons. The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled today that site owners could be held liable for transmitting data to Facebook without users' consent -- which appears to be exactly what happens when users visit a site with a Like button, whether or not they click it.

The ruling doesn't stop Facebook, or other companies with similar widgets, from offering these options. But sites must obtain consent from users before sending data to Facebook, unless they can demonstrate a "legitimate interest" in doing otherwise. Right now, data gets seemingly sent to Facebook as the page loads -- before users have a chance to opt out. So in the future, sites might have to approach Like buttons differently.

(Revised draft: added comments on sinister country profiling. Also 1) Turns out IQ beats random selection in the best of applications by less than 6%, typically <2%, as the computation of correlations have a flaw and psychologists do not seem to know the informational value of correlation in terms of "how much do I gain information about B knowing A" and propagation of error (intra-test variance for a single individual). 2) Showed noise IQ/Weath, 3) Added information showing the story behind the effectiveness of Average National IQ is, statistically, a fraud. The psychologists who engaged me on this piece -- with verbose writeups --made the mistake of showing me the best they got: papers with the strongest pro-IQ arguments. They do not seem to grasp what noise/signal really means in practice. For some technical backbone to this piece,see here.)

Additional Variance: Unlike measurements of height or wealth, which carry a tiny relative error, many people get yuugely different results for the same IQ test (I mean the same person!), up to 2 standard deviations as measured across people, higher than sampling error in the population itself! This additional source of sampling error weakens the effect by propagation of uncertainty way beyond its predictability when applied to the evaluation of a single individual. It also tells you that you as an individual are vastly more diverse than the crowd, at least with respect to that measure!

There are contradictory stories about whether IQ ceases to work past a threshold, since Terman's longitudinal study of "geniuses". What these researchers don't get is these contradictions come from the fact that the variance of the IQ measure increases with IQ. Not a good thing.

If you renamed IQ , from "Intelligent Quotient" to FQ "Functionary Quotient" or SQ "Salaryperson Quotient", then some of the stuff will be true. It measures best the ability to be a good slave confined to linear tasks. "IQ" is good for @davidgraeber's "BS jobs".

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
L. Cohen

IQ tests are a bust cos repeated attempts and coaching on techniques improves your score. Therefore what is being measured is not intelligence.

Also, we now understand that "intelligence" is not a single score but mnifests quite differently with different people, so a set of tests is unlikely to cover most of the skill sets, let alone create a satisfactory single figure to decide who is or who is not capable.

You have to remember that, at least in the US, people get shunted into psychology majors by desperate college counselors who do not know what else to do with people who have the math skills of a turnip.

If by "turnip" you refer to the root vegetable that fell off the truck this morning: a credulous, gullible, naive person.

"Intelligence" having little to do with measurement of one's proficiency applying alegbraic or arithmetic or geometry rules sets to manipulation of quantitative values. Then again, it's my view 95% of any functional skill sets (lately aided by CS computational fomulae) require no more sophistication than rudimentary rote mastery and application of algebraic and geometric ahh (theorem) postulates.

death of "long division"

Statistical information has a valuable place in estimating limits of tangible, physical properties (ie. periodic elements) of things manufactured by people for people consumption. Mechanical engineering would not normally include "psychology," it is true, if only because granularity of interaction observations between these physical properties relative to human physiology and their certain expression are unknown, indeterminate or immeasurable. Why pretend otherwise?

I have seen things (ROY, Blade Runner) over the past 35 years that suggest to me, innumeracy produced in the generations of students proceeding from my own is systematically determined by people who control political economy of a population. That is to say, innumeracy begins with public and "private" educators who do not exercise analytical principles in pedagogy. Instead they train their pupils in keyboard codes which symbolize unstated assumptions. Proficiency with keyboard codes is what standardized examinations measures. Consequently, many students, regardless of "scientific" interest in a particular vocation, are trained to reproduce instantiated, or dogmatic, ethical conclusions. They emerge from degree programs without experience with or skepticism toward the subject in hand which they purport to assay.

death of "p-value"

All this before one even attempts to verify THE central limit theorem--on which every westworld decision relies--with actual enumeration by subjects empaneled and inferences extrapolated from a sample; all this before one validates methodology ascribed to big data set compiled by 3 < x > 65* co-authors transforming "qualitative" responses from sundry data-collection devices--motives, mes rhea, or, shall we say, "psychometric data", to quantitative units relative to normal distributions of "prior art", describing wtf values in any given period. Baseline reference to people, process, or thing is not constant: Let's agree. Think about that the next time someone starts yammering about "progressive" policy benefit. When certainty no longer obtains objective precursors of recursive experimental observation, it is indeed time to evaluate standardized criteria of "the good" for every case. So much for universal law.

I could share inexplicable "statistics for psychology" curriculum, provided by my associate, that defined by or satisfice proficiency in python programming to collate rat or mice subject trial observations said to represent human physiology, of which human "cognitive" systems, but I won't. Objective "basic research" hit the nadir of plausible "applied science" while you were Googling. Res ipsa loquitor.

B. Russell and K. Popper philosophical treatises on subjectivity short: Barriers to "intelligence" and "truth" measurement are ubiquitous and artificial. For example, The World of Mathematics (1956) vol. 1-IV are not public domain material. Somewhere therein J.R. Newman is reported to caution "turnips"**.

Mathematical economics is old enough to be respectable, but not all economists respect it. It has powerful supporters and impressive testimonials, yet many capable economists deny that mathematics, except as a shorthand or expository device, can be applied to economic reasoning. There have even been rumors that mathematics is used in economics (and in other social sciences) either for the deliberate purpose of mystification or to confer dignity upon commonplaces as French was once used in diplomatic communications. .... To be sure, mathematics can be extended to any branch of knowledge, including economics, provided the concepts are so clearly defined as to permit accurate symbolic representation. That is only another way of saying that in some branches of discourse it is desirable to know what you are talking about.

--
* longest published citation I have observed

** True story. Talked today with yet another immigrant (taxi driver) who didn't know he was "Black or African American" until he arrived in the USA. What else didn't he know? Need I ask in order to qualify "intelligence."

Foregoing be it may, I had a satisfying consultation today with the second neurologist on my list of "expert" MS diagnosticians in Bal'more.

I've had no treatment over 21 years for MS symptoms. I have from time to time evaluated published epidemiology and proprietary pharma trial literature purporting therapeutic cost/benefit. This consultation was satisfying to me in so far as the clinician agreed with my reasoning: There are still no DATA indicating positive therapeutic treatment of disease prognosis.

< pick teeth, suck vigorously>
I got a fun story about an LBS elective populated with PhD candidates who didn't know how to operate either phone or email to query corp actuaries' willingness or ability to answer the question: Method of "human capital" valuation.